British Sitcom History Podcast

This month we are looking at the somewhat forgotten mid nineties sitcom Is it Legal?

Coming from Simon Nye while still riding high on the success of Men Behaving Badly, the show features theatre star Imelda Staunton in a relatively rare lead role.

As part of our look at early Last of the Summer Wine, we came across the name of James "Jimmy" Gilbert, who was a big cheese at the BBC for many years. He played a big part in the satire boom of the sixties, brought The Two Ronnies together, and commissioned some of your favourite sitcoms.

I found an in depth interview with him and listened to it all so you don't have to! But if you want to anyway, you can find it here:
https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/james-jimmy-gilbert

This week we're having a look at one of the episodes from Seven of One, an anthology series designed to find sitcoms built around Ronnie Barker. The series spawned two huge successes, Porridge and Open All Hours. But this one didn't.

Written by Roy Clarke at the same time he was birthing Last of the Summer Wine, Spanner's Eleven sees Ronnie Barker as the incompetent manager of an incompetent lower league football team. Expect weak football puns and a surprising amount of seventies smut!

Part 2 of our look at just the tip of the long-running Last of the Summer Wine. We finish our analysis of the episode, marvel at the technical set dressing of a church, and take a closer look at the work of Michael Bates.

This week we begin an epic journey into the world's longest running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine. We'll start by looking at just the first two series, after which Michael Bates left.

Here, we talk about the meandering and pointless nature of the first series, and we get a closer look at the careers of Peter Sallis and Bill Owen.